ABSTRACT
Do individuals who break the law act recklessly and impulsively, or are their actions based on reasoning and calculations of risk and yield? Harry King was a well-known “boxman”; his specialty was opening safes. He enjoyed his life of crime and accepted prison sentences when they came as “the price you pay.” With money he got by robbing grocery stores, banks, and restaurants, King would spend tens of thousands on a weekend in Las Vegas, buy his current girlfriend a house, cash down, wear expensive suits, and lavish money on friends and strangers alike. If arrested, he relied on lawyers to get him out on bail. If he had no money, he would immediately commit another “caper” to get the ten or twenty thousand dollars to pay the bail bondsman’s fee, compensate his lawyer, and make whatever bribes to judges and prosecutors he needed to have his case “fixed.”1
